It might be as well here to point out that until the Restoration and its comedies brought scenery and attempts at scenic realism to the stage, the Play and the Novel were practically the same form. Or it might be better to put it that the Novel was the direct development of the play--a development made possible by the art of printing. In effect the plays of Shakespeare were novels written for recitation, and that, naturally, was still more the case with the works of Shakespeare’s predecessors. And it is significant that as reading became more common with the establishment of Edward VI’s grammar schools, the play itself became less a matter of rantings and by degrees even a medium for fine writing. _Gorboduc_ and _Ferrex and Porrex_ or _Ralph Roister Doister_ were products of either a stilted classicism or of a boisterous, native spirit of knockabout buffoonery, puns, and ribald jests. The classical motive issued presently into a mode of over-written elegance that speedily proved itself unreadable: then Lyly gave place to Shakespeare. It has always seemed obvious to me--as a private conviction for which I have no wish to do battle and which I have no wish to force on the reader as any more than a suggestion--that Shakespeare himself regretted the literary chastity of his muse. I mean that Shakespeare, as gentleman and one wishing to sport his coat-of-arms in the very best social and scholastic circles, deprecated the passing of the Unities and of bombast and wished that the popular taste would have let him make a living by verse in the style of the _Rape of Lucrece_ and the more florid poems that decorate the last pages of editions of his works. His speeches to the players in _Hamlet_ and all his life as far as it is known would seem to indicate that. But it is not until you can bring yourself to regard not merely the plays of Shakespeare but the whole post-Lylian Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as novels written for recitation that the great mystery of Shakespeare’s life seems to become reasonably explicable. For the great mystery of Shakespeare as novelist is simply: “Why did Shakespeare never correct his proofs?” Beside this amazing enormity all questions as to the identity of Mr. W. H. or the Dark Lady or Mary Fitton or of the motives of the sonnets become paler and more ineffectual than any ghosts. For they at least don’t matter. But that the greatest writer of all time should not have taken the trouble ever to read his own works in print, preferring to retire to Stratford, sue out his coat armour and so, on his profits as theatre owner, become titularly and legally a Gentleman--that, if you think about it and have ever known an author, is the most amazing phenomenon known to the history of Literature. Napoleon at St. Helena, renaming himself Monsieur Dupont and shuddering at the mention of Austerlitz, would not be more astonishing. For this novelist never blotted a line and never saw his work through the press!